“Were you optimistic enough about this evening to have deployed a tactical wank before coming out?”
It’s not, I’d wager, the opening line a guy expects to hear when he sits across a table from you to endure the five minutes of mandatory small talk during the arse-clenchingly awkward living hell that it is Speed Dating, but it rarely fails to provoke an entertaining reaction.
But, in my defence, I was bored.
If you’ve been lucky enough to avoid it, let me explain that Speed Dating is agonisingly awful. It somehow enhances all the of the dreary small talk and casual disappointment of regular dating, whilst simultaneously stripping anything even remotely enjoyable from the experience. I can only imagine it was created purely as a means to prove that, when it comes down to it, perhaps there are some circumstances in which being single and lonely is preferable to the hateful alternative.
It’s essentially a meat-market, wherein you’re first forced to engage in idle chit-chat with the tender-loin you intend to consume. And, just like at a meat-market, in most cases the potential meals would simply rather not be eaten at all.